When you install Xapian, you want to probably make sure that you install it into a directory that will minimize impact on the 'rest' of your OS.

Use configure with the --prefix option to force Xapian to install into /opt/local like this:

./configure --prefix=/opt/local

with both the xapian-core and xapian-bindings files.

This should be safe for both OSX and Linux machines.
